Decolonizing Approaches to Latin American Social Movements

This chapter introduces decolonizing approaches as a perspective from which to study Latin American social movements. Decolonizing approaches allow us to surpass the disheartening diagnoses of a significant part of social movement theories that argue that Latin American movements had little potentia to denounce modernity crises and even less to offer alternatives to it. The decolonizing approaches show that the theories on social movements are colonial despite being critical of modernity. The purpose of this chapter is to elucidate how the decolonizing approaches provide crucial elements and debates to resist and comprehend basic colonial premises and enable a change of terms under which we can produce, evaluate, and stratify knowledge on social movements. It is the dialogue with movements—as opposed to about movements—that makes it possible to evaluate collective action. The chapter is structured in four sections. The first describes the consolidation of decolonizing approaches. The second presents its contributions to the study of Latin American social movements. Section three maps some of the concepts proposed by decolonizing approaches that constitute analytical keys for approaching collective action today. The last section points to the decolonizing readings of the struggles for territory in Latin America as an emerging research-action area indubitably urgent today. The chapter ends by recognizing challenges for the decolonizing approaches and their study of social movements.